Two decades ago, that city transformed itself into a poster child of the semiconductor industry, luring Sematech there in 1987. Since then, Texas' investments in manufacturing decreased as other high-tech sectors, like software, took off. Sematech traded Texas' capital for New York's.

“Albany is at a tipping point,” Sematech's Mr. Armbrust said. “The desire to work across company boundaries created Silicon Valley. And that's what's happening here.”

Layoffs in the early 1990s changed all that. IBM's vulnerability startled employees and signaled a crisis in the state's high-tech economy. Mr. Montgomery jumped ship, embarking on a nearly two-decade odyssey that has mirrored the volatile growth of global computing and New York's struggle to reclaim its perch in the nation's high-tech economy.

As jobs and skilled workers left the state, so did Mr. Montgomery—for Europe, then for Silicon Valley and, as chip manufacturing moved north, to Oregon's Silicon Forest.

Now, after more than $2 billion in state commitments, New York's tech sector is back—as is Mr. Montgomery. Improbably, the epicenter is Albany, known more for bureaucracy than innovation.

Two economists, Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Cesar Hidalgo of MIT, have just released their 364-page “Atlas of Economic Complexity,” which claims to be the best model yet for predicting how much nations will grow in the future. So what’s the secret?

As it turns out, the authors argue, the best way to tell how rich a country will get isn’t by looking at things like political institutions, or the rule of law, or even education levels. Nope, it’s far better to look at what they call a country’s “collective knowledge.” That means looking, primarily, at how many different products a country creates — and particularly how many unique products a country makes, things that no other countries are making (say, medical-imaging devices). For example, the authors note that Pakistan and Singapore both export a similar number of types of products. But Singapore’s exports tend to be relatively rarer on the world stage than Pakistan’s, and the country’s much richer as a result.

Emphasis added. Albany is not just a nanotech cluster. It is the nanotech cluster. Try as other metros might, there is no Next Albany.